


but there's wolves

by anxiouswerewolf



Category: Victorious
Genre: Angst, Coming Out, F/F, I'm bad at tags, Sexuality Crisis, idk just read it, not a bade fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-22 20:07:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12489820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anxiouswerewolf/pseuds/anxiouswerewolf
Summary: There's something that happens when someone you know is praised for sharing a trait with you that you've always kept secret. You envy them for having the freedom to embrace it. But sometimes envy can be a good thing, a catalyst for dreams you've had before.





	but there's wolves

**Author's Note:**

> This idea has kind of been bumbling around in my head for months, but I got a pretty bad mystery stomach sickness for two weeks and was throwing up off and on, and the only thing that routinely made me feel better was rewatching Victorious. Eventually this began to take shape and now I'm publishing the first chapter!

No matter how much she tried to put it out of her head, Jade kept coming back to that damn picture. Tori Vega posted on The Slap on October 11. It was a picture of her, and around her shoulders was a pink, purple, and blue flag. The caption read “Happy National Coming Out Day! I’ve known I was bisexual for years but always hid because I was scared and because I could. To anyone else who might be struggling with their sexuality: you don’t have to hide. I’ll be there for you.” It received 100 likes in less than an hour, and it was up to 672. That was almost the entire Hollywood Arts student body.

On October 11, Jade West had stayed home from school and not talked to anyone. She had written several things in notebooks or on sticky notes only to obliterate them: she went over them with Sharpie, ripped up the paper, and burned it in the bathroom. She tried to type something up on her laptop but kept backspacing after the smallest words or letters. She obsessively checked The Slap and all she saw was Tori Vega wrapped in that flag and smiling, smiling about getting to be herself.

Now Jade was sitting on her living room couch, phone in hand and notebook on the coffee table out of reach. She was supposed to be working on a play, but every time she sat down to try to write she would be filled with writer’s block, distracted by her own thoughts and incapable of writing anything down that made sense. She started several drafts but ended up tearing up the pages and convincing herself she could do better. At the moment she had a title printed across the top of a page, and a little number 65 in the top right corner. Jade had acquired the habit, a long time ago, of numbering the pages of her notebooks. She had no real reason to do it except for the calming aspects of its repetitive nature. She had to focus on the numbers, but it was just simple enough that she could do it without becoming frustrated at herself. Sometimes she would buy new books for the sake of numbering them, although it helped to kickstart her creativity when she tried to find something she could write in her new purchase.

She was self-aware enough now to recognize that simply buying something wouldn’t fix her writer’s block, that it was something much deeper inside of her refusing to let words come onto paper. That block was driving her crazy and she knew it had to be extracted. Jade usually had no problem writing about difficult things, as she always knew her audience. The plays she wrote to appease her father when he deigned to come to her shows were different from short works she put on for Hollywood Arts were different from the demented films she released to the public were different from the poems and songs she kept in a box in her room, never to be seen by anyone, not even herself after writing them.

Maybe that was the problem. She didn’t know her audience. She wanted her father to know, she wanted Hollywood Arts to know, she wanted the public to know, but at the same time she wanted it to remain a secret, to never have to deal with the fallout.

Jade put her phone down on the other cushion of the couch. When she caught herself looking at it out of the corner of her eye for any notifications, she picked it back up and tossed it to the floor across the room, hoping that would be enough to stop the urges. She then picked up her pen and began to write as best she remembered. Start in the middle, she remembered. It was a cure for writer’s block. Start with the part you know you want to write and work your way to the parts you don’t know yet. By the time you get there, you’ll have figured something out.

_LILY: The Bible never tells us what became of Cain. Different traditions have their own interpretations, but in the end there’s no definitive account._

_MARA: Why are you telling me this?_

_LILY: Because you’re so hung up on the Bible that you don’t realize how much isn’t there. It’s been men in power filling in the gaps for thousands of years._

_MARA: Cain had a curse upon him. Whoever killed him would be given seven times his curse._

_LILY: Then you better hope that nobody kills you._

~*~

Tori was staring at Jade’s profile on The Slap. It hadn’t been updated since October 10, which was unusual for her. For someone who put on an aura of the alternative, Jade betrayed herself as a mainstream millennial by her level of social media use. Tori supposed that it was another way of letting Jade vent, a way that wouldn’t necessarily come through in a play or short story. Those, after all, had to be written in a way that would have them be taken seriously by adults, whereas a post on social media was accessible for teenagers.

Jade hadn’t liked the picture Tori had posted for National Coming Out Day, nor commented on it. She was much less liberal with her likes than her dislikes, but the rest of their group had showered Tori in profuse praise for her bravery, and so not to do so would make Jade appear all the worse. Tori didn’t think her reluctant friend would be a bigot – she was, after all, no stranger to being judged for things out of her control – so Tori optimistically chose to assume that Jade hadn’t seen it, and that it was part of the same off the grid experiment that meant Jade wasn’t posting at all.

The thought of Jade going radio silent for days made Tori worry. Jade was never one to hide away and let herself be forgotten, so any deviation from the norm made her friends suspicious. Surely Beck would have known something about something. Tori switched from her laptop to her phone.

TORI: Hey, is everything ok with Jade?

BECK: Yeah, why?

TORI: She hasn’t updated her profile or texted me in days.

BECK: She does that sometimes. Probably writing.

TORI: Have you heard from her?

BECK: No.

BECK: I’ve stopped questioning it.

Tori could not be as nonchalant as her friend, however, and even though she told herself that she could trust the opinion of someone who had known Jade much longer and in a much greater capacity than Tori, her Spidey sense was still going off, and she needed a way to get it to stop ringing.

~*~

The actual buzz of her phone for once was what made Jade stand up from the half a page of dialogue she had written and stared at for a few minutes. She knew that there was more in her, but that block still wouldn’t let her through and she hadn’t developed a good plan for getting around it yet. The text served as a way to yank her back into the real world and help her forget about the block.

TORI: Hey, are you ok?

JADE: Why wouldn’t I be?

TORI: You’ve been really quiet the past few days.

JADE: Getting sick.

TORI: Aw, I’m sorry. :(

JADE: Working on a new play too. Focusing on that.

TORI: What’s it about?

_Only a story about coming to terms with one’s sexuality through heated debate and historical allusions that would fly over your head._

JADE: The devil, to some degree.

TORI: Sounds cool. When you finish you should let me read it.

JADE: We’ll see.

Jade could see that Tori had read the message but hadn’t responded, and she assumed the conversation was done for the time being. As glad as she was to have some sort of contact, that it was Vega left a bad taste in Jade’s mouth. She remembered when Beck used to text first every day to check in on her or show her pictures of the few things she actually enjoyed. Then he realized that it was one-sided and that if he didn’t text, she wouldn’t. Nowadays any conversation they had was spontaneous and only when they were in the same room together. She didn’t want it to become that way with Vega, but as she stared at her phone she couldn’t think of anything to say.

Looking back at the paper, it seemed that rang true on multiple accounts.


End file.
